The evils of promiscuity cannot be exaggerated. In the larger workhouses male and female inmates dine together, work together in kitchens and laundries and in the open yards and corridors, with results that are obvious. In a fortuitous assembly of such people the lowest common denominator of morality is easily adopted as the standard. What a terrible place is a General Mixed Workhouse to which to send children or young people. One cannot read some of the passages in the report for which Mrs. Sidney Webb and her colleagues were responsible without shuddering at our own guiltiness and folly as ratepayers for allowing these things to be done in our name. "No less distressing," they say, "has it been to discover a continuous intercourse which we think must be injurious between young and old, innocent and hardened. In the female dormitories and day rooms women of all ages and of the most varied characters and conditions necessarily associate together without any kind of restraint on their mutual intercourse. There are no separate bedrooms; there are not even separate cubicles. The young servant out of place, the prostitute recovering from disease, the feeble-minded woman of any age, the girl with her first baby, the unmarried mother coming in to be confined of her third or fourth bastard, the senile, the paralytic, the epileptic, the respectable deserted wife, the widow to whom out-door relief has been refused, are all herded indiscriminately together. We have found respectable old women annoyed by day and by night by the presence of noisy and dirty imbeciles; idiots who are physically offensive or mischievous, or so noisy as to create a disturbance by day or night with their howls, are often found in Workhouses mixing with others, both in the sick wards and in the body of the house."